Rolando Alarcón

Rolando Alarcón was a Chilean singer/songwriter of the 60s and early 70s.
I heard some of his music when I lived in Ecuador in 1967/8 - my mother
Alice had a tape of it, courtesy of some local Peace Corps workers
who had traveled to Chile.
We listened to it over and over.
I loved the songs, and they have haunted me ever since.

Alarcón's lyrics are romantic, humanist, patriotic, profound and beautiful.
His music blends a strummed-guitar folk sound with
the drums and panpipes of indigenous Andean music,
and the harmony is fresh and creative.
The overall sound is unique.
Alice says:
"As a folk poet as well as a musician, Alarcon beats Dylan all hollow."
As great as I think Dylan is, I have to agree with her.

Alarcón died in 1973.
In an interview,
Patricio Manns says that Alarcón suffered an internal hemorrhage
and was taken to a first-aid station instead of a hospital,
that the doctors there refused to operate on him because
they were enemies of Allende, and that he died after five days.
This was about 6 months before the Pinochet coup.
(A relative of Alarcón says this story is apocryphal:
that Alarcón was in Chañarall and had a bleeding ulcer,
that he travelled to Santiago, was admitted to a hospital,
and died on the operating table.)

A year ago, after an unsuccessful attempt to copy
the old reel-to-reel tapes to CD,
I started looking for the music on the Internet.
Finally, thanks to my friend Emilio in Barcelona,
who asked his friend Leonardo in Chile,
I tracked it down and got a copy on cassette.
The release is called "No Juegues a Ser Soldado".
After many late nights (and many tears) I completed a web page of
No Juegues a Ser Soldado
with the music (in MP3 form) and the lyrics in Spanish and English
.

If you have, or know of, any other Alarcon recordings, please
email me.
With all the technology in the world, I think it's criminal
that great and historically important music can disappear forever,
to be replaced by a million pressings of 'N Sync, etc.

Many thanks to Kristina, who supplied most of the MP3s.

An excellent biography of Alarcón,
and a very complete discography, can be found on
Wikipedia